I already mentioned in another thread - don't no which one and where at this board - that ESA will lease Columbus to private companies and to movie-people also. Obviously NASA turns to similar ways now that they are aboiut giving up the ISS due to the financial pressure they feel by budget constraints and the Bush Plan.

NASA is ready and willing to share the international space station (ISS) with other U.S. government agencies and commercial firms once construction of the $100 billion orbital outpost is finished in 2010.

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IT's very interesting to read the article - the approach is similar to ESA's one and thus is different to it. But the main aspects, properties and reasons are nearly the same.

One point makes me wonder if the ISS may be involved in future free trade polititics and discussions about trade treaties: NASA is speaking about the ISS as national laboratory. Of course this will regard the US-parts only but the point is that the US-part will be given to US-companies and organisations only while Columbus to europena ones only I suppose this moment. To me this is looking a bit silly - each nation should lease to privates of each nation since the components and modules are not copies of each other but are complements.

"... What we're trying to do is open up the U.S. segment of the space station to be utilized by a variety of folks, both governmental and maybe commercial, in the future so that we can take the maximum advantage of the space station that we're in the process of assembling right now," said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, during a teleconference with reporters.

Another quote is

Quote:

"... Previously, we had anticipated that all the research conducted on the station would be research within NASA's mission portfolio," said Mark Uhran, the space agency's associate administrator for the ISS. "Now what we're looking to do is make the facility available to other government agencies or private firms to pursue their own research interests."

The amount available to non-NASA-users also has been told publicly:

Quote:

About half of all those U.S. assets are expected to be available for use by private commercial enterprises or non-NASA government agencies, Uhran said.